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When I was a kid, my sister and I fought incessantly. We fought over everything and nothing. If Mom settled one argument, we immediately found something else to fight about. To her, and perhaps to us, the purported substance of the disputes was unimportant -- we were immature brats and we were gonna go at it about something anyway.
If you could get the priests of High Broderism to really come clean about their bipartisanship fetish, I am convinced they would see no difference between our current political situation and those long-ago sibling squabbles. After decades of writing and reading horse-race election coverage, eating lobbyist's cocktail weenies, and gossiping about irrelevant nonsense, they have convinced themselves that the stuff we care about -- the substantive issues underlying and fueling our icky partisanship -- is unimportant. If it wasn't our childish mewling about habeas corpus, it would be something else. If we weren't complaining about warrantless wiretapping and waterboarding, we would create some other excuse to start another round of "he started it." It is always something with those bratty children who refuse to grow up. Caring about substance is just so ... juvenile.
They really act as if they think they are the grown-ups in all this, and that we need to be punished for our tantrums. Convincing a richer Joe Lieberman to monkey-wrench the 2008 campaign is the moral equivalent of sending us to bed without supper.
